Michael Bay tries to act like there's more to life than wreckage

Rating: 5/10 (6 August 2005)

Watching "The Island" is like observing someone trying to pick up a pin while wearing hockey gloves. Director Michael Bay, specialist in Shiny Things That Blow Up, here unexpectedly finds himself dealing with an idea, and an opportunity to make a film that isn't hateful ("Bad Boys II"), boring ("Armageddon"), or, well..."Pearl Harbor." He partially pulls it off, which is a compliment. Although it's not saying much, this is Bay's best film to date. Perhaps it's just his miserable track record, but I found myself rooting for "The Island" in spite of myself.
Everything about this movie, down to the marketing, screams "house of cards in a hurricane." "The Island"'s ad campaigns have clumsily spoiled what could have been a passable surprise, namely that the dystopic colony of the film's first half, populated by track suit-clad, metabolically-monitored drones is actually a clone farm for the very rich and very ill. When replacement parts are needed by their "sponsors," subjects are cast as lottery winners, to be whisked off to an imaginary island paradise, supposedly Earth's last refuge from a mass contamination, also imaginary, that these "survivors" are told led to their arrival. This is a good set up that could go in a number of directions, but Bay seems impatient with having to spend so much time on sequences that operate at less than 100 MPH. While intriguing, "The Island"'s first half feels rushed and sloppy. It's amazing to see, in a colony where even urine is analyzed as it hits the commode, the ease with which its inhabitants are able to hatch secret plans, wander into off-limits area, and hoodwink security systems.
Like a little boy squirming as mom wipes his face after dinner, Bay finally gets to go outside, and seems much surer of himself on the more familiar ground of jet motorcycles, giant dumbbells wrecking expensive cars at high speed, and chases among flying trains. The film is from here out thoroughly in combustion mode, and is as entertaining as such stuff can be, though annoyingly strobe-edited as in previous Bay apocalypsi.
There's interesting material in "The Island," from notions of corporate bioethics to the human survival instinct to the nature of existence, themes that could be probed with a subtler and less hyperactive hand. Some of the great earlier Schwarzenegger films have delved into this material, and it's a measure of Bay's temperament to note that those films seem to be intimate character studies in comparison. As usual, Bay is most interested in fast-moving objects meeting fiery endings, but with "The Island," he at least tips his cap to something more challenging. I suppose that's a start.